Last night (Sunday night) I also went to Leuven en Scene again, for the two night performances that I missed on Saturday night.  Unfortunately, I timed it exactly wrong and ended up arriving at the venue (a park) at the same time as EVERYONE else.

This meant that I waited in line for about twenty minutes.  At around 23 minutes, something happened… a lady walked by, said something in Dutch to all of the people in line, then skipped the entire line.  This was apparently a cue for the rest of the back of the line to skip the line.  I asked a person next to me what was going on; apparently the line was for candles, and if you didn’t care about having a candle you could just go in.  Since I was almost at the front of the line, I elected to get my candle, which was a tea candle in a paper bag.  Once I’d gotten that, and made my way into the park, I discovered that almost everyone had just taken their bagged candles and hung them on the fence… curious.

There were also some really cool structures and lights all over the place.

The first performance was Don Q, a retelling of some sort of Don Quixote, which was really confusing because I (a) can’t speak Dutch and (b) mistook it for Don Juan.  After watching a guy on fake horseback running around with a sword for a while, I realized that it was the windmill-tilting Don and not the lady-seducing Don.

The performance itself was pretty cool; there were a variety of fire-arts (poi, staff, fan, and sword) though all the spinning was simple enough that I think I could have done it. There was also a giant several-person fabric dragon, which I utterly failed trying to photograph. After it was all over, their clean-up music was the Breaking of the Fellowship, from LOTR, which was awesome.

I then tried to get to the other performance, got really confused, and left.  Overall it was a pretty fun night, though.

Unfortunately, most of the pictures didn’t turn out, because my camera’s not that great for taking night photos.  Also, it seems like Belgians really don’t have as much of a photo-taking culture as Americans do, so I felt a bit awkward whipping my camera out every five seconds.

Yesterday, I skyped with my parents.

Then Chris logged on.

Apparently he was at the Toronto (I think that’s the right city?) Science Museum with NatMat and Erika.

I took screenshots.

And here are a few pictures from the festival, Leuven in Scene.  If I could read Dutch, I would tell you all about it… sadly, while many of the words in the program are decipherable (such as openluchttheaterfestival, which apparently means open air theater festival) many of the other words are entirely incomprehensible to me.  For example, I would think that the phrase “drukte in de stad” meant “drunk in the stadium,” but apparently it means “crowds in the city.”

Anyway, I went to a few of the performances, including the ‘musical structures,’ the unicycling, the parkour demonstrations, the Chinese mast, and the trapeze performance.  I also had split from my group of people, so I spent about a half hour creepily watching children attempt to climb the Chinese mast while waiting for the actual performer to do another performance.  In the end, completely worth it, because had I left I would have missed the awesome French miming trapeze show thing.  (Really, the whole performance was more of a mime with some aerial arts than a trapeze show with some mime.  Pretty cool!) 

Unfortunately, I was forced to pass by the slam poetry booth because I don’t speak Dutch.  Next time…

I went into Leuven today with the sole purpose of having a good time.  I went with five other students working with IMEC this summer, and unfortunately discovered that I really dislike roaming in packs (nothing wrong with the people, just a personal preference).  The day started out in the early afternoon, because I accidentally stayed up until 3am reading a book.  I rode a bike downtown, and we wandered around a bit, finding an international market and an interesting statue, before I split off from the group to go to a festival.

And now… a post about Belgium! You will notice that it looks like IKEA vomited all over my studio room apartment flat thing.  I’ll address that at the end.

I’ve been here for about 60 or so hours now, and have gone from having a rather terrible time to really enjoying myself in the past seven or so hours.

I was having a rather terrible time at first because I did multiple registration things, sat through two keynote speeches for a technical conference, did a lab tour, and walked a whole lot on two hours of sleep while hungry wearing my travel clothes.

Yesterday, when I got into Brussels, I found that my luggage had unfortunately been delayed in Dublin.  While this was not really a surprise (I sprinted through the Dublin airport and cut to the front of several security lines to make my flight) it was very unfortunately because all of my stuff was in my checked bag.  Stuff like clothes.  And some food.

Understandably, yesterday was a bit miserable.  However, today went much better.  I woke up after sleeping in a bed, found out that my luggage was at the airport, and took a bus then a train to the airport, retrieved my bag, and returned home.  I then acquired a fiets (bicycle), bought shampoo, crèmespoeling (conditioner), douchegel (shower gel), and sinaasappel en perzik handzeep (orange and peach soap). Don’t ask me how to pronounce any of that, because I’ve no idea.

Next was one of the greatest showers of my life.  I had soap AND clean clothes, which is a great amount of improvement over my shower yesterday.  Finally, I bought food (and had to stuff a loaf of bread down my shirt to bike home because my backpack wasn’t actually large enough) and cooked myself a delicious meal.

The pictures, however, reflect none of this.  These pictures are from me unpacking the three boxes that were in the studio when I got here.  This may be the first time that I all matching plates, dishes, silverwear, etc. in my living space, and it’s AWESOME.

Also, more HPV pictures.

I’m alive, in Belgium, and have internet!

And to begin this summer, I’m posting a few pictures from last semester.

(RPRM is the course Real Products, Real Markets, for which I and two other students made bookmarks for Olin Post-Graduate Planning to give to the seniors, and attempted and failed to sell Reddit earrings to Breadpig.)